Moscow-Washington hot line turns fifty

Aug 05 2013

Rossiyskaya Gazeta

Ekaterina Zabrodina

President Richard Nixon talks with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev June 20, 1973 at Camp David, MD. Brezhnev met with members of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee to sign an agreement to prevent nuclear war with the US. Source: Getty Images / Fotobank

The famous link between the U.S. president and Soviet leaders was launched half a century ago.

The famous hot
line connecting Washington and Moscow celebrates and important milestone this
month. The line, which was launched in 1963, turns 50 this month. It was
established in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, when
the need for a direct link between the United States and the Soviet Union
became clear. The line was used as an emergency link between the leaders of the
two superpowers at the height of the Cold War.

There are many
myths surrounding the line, beginning with its name. To begin with, it was not
direct. The connection was by cable under the Atlantic and then via London, Copenhagen,
Stockholm and Helsinki; a backup system ran through Tangier, Morocco. In 1978,
international satellite systems began to be used. Additionally, it was not
initially a telephone – the heads of state exchanged text messages transmitted
by teletype. It was only in the early 1970s under Leonid Brezhnev that a telephone
was installed.

The line has long
been out of use – today the presidents prefer to speak by telephone, but it
remains in excellent shape. The Washington Post recently published reminiscences by former White
House situation room chiefMichael Bohn, who worked under Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon
and Jimmy Carter, and explained how the leaders used the system when tensions
arose. Bohn also stated that the system is still tested every hour.

The hot line
opened with trial letter sent by the Americans in August 1963. It was the phrase “The quick brown fox
jumped over the lazy dog,” which contains all the letters in the English
alphabet. The line was first actually used in the early days of the 1967
Arab-Israeli war, when about 20 messages were transmitted. Bohn recalls that U.S.
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara woke up President Johnson at 7 am to tell him
that a message from Soviet premier Kosygin had been received.

Kosygin asked the
U.S. to bring pressure to bear on Israel to put an end to the conflict in the
Middle East. The Americans set about writing a reply and even sent a
preliminary question to the Soviet side, asking what the proper way was to address
the recipient. Moscow explained: “Comrade Kosygin.”

The U.S. and
Soviet presidents exchanged messages in 1971 over conflicts between India-Pakistan
incident and again in 1979, when the Americans protested against the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan. At that time, the U.S. president threatened the Soviet
Union with “serious consequences” but signed his letter to Brezhnev diplomatically:
“with best wishes, Jimmy Carter.”

The red line was
also used in peacetime. For example, President Johnson ordered a message to be
sent to the Soviet Union informing it of the American Apollo spaceship
missions.

A fax line was
added to the hot line in 1985. It was used in 1985 to transmit a long,
hand-written message from Gorbachev, and the American translators were hard put
to make out his handwriting. Gorbachev and Reagan were the last leaders to use
the line. In 1991, a direct telephone link was installed. It was used by Boris
Yeltsin and George Bush Sr.